The attempt on President McKinley’s life at Buffalo
on Friday last touched, as it could not fail to do, the national feeling, instantly
and deeply. Nor could any moral and humane person hesitate to denounce without
reservation the infamy of a crime not to be excused were the victim the meanest,
instead of the most exalted, citizen. The usual confusion of thought has arisen
among partisans who grudged a simple expression of sorrow as incompatible with
aversion to the President’s policy. And, finally, rejoicing in the failure of
the assassin’s aim has been heightened among sober friends as well as opponents
of the Administration, by the dread of the Government’s passing under a new
and untried control in the person of the actual Vice-President.
The season of year, the exact interval of two
decades, the foreign extraction of the criminal, have conspired forcibly to
revive the memory of Garfield’s fate. But there was wanting, in Mr. McKinley’s
case, that preparation for high tension in the public mind which grew out of
Conkling’s quarrel with the Administration over spoils, and the subsequent Senatorial
deadlock which Guiteau, with method in his madness, sought to dissolve. Hence,
the excitement of the past week has fallen short of that visible in this city,
at least, in the summer of 1881. But, also, it must be confessed, we have had,
in the unhappy past three years, a satiety of carnage and horror until we almost
cease to feel. If Aguinaldo had been shot while extending a friendly hand to
Gen. Funston, as the President to Czolgosz, would our jaded pulse have been
sensibly quickened above the normal beat with which we heard of the bloodless
success of that stratagem? It could not be said in Garfield’s time as now that
we sip lynchings and negro burnings unmoved with our coffee at breakfast; and
this fact alone speaks volumes regarding the prevailing callousness as to the
taking of human life.
Another difference in the comparison is that Guiteau’s
purpose was political, while Czolgosz’s motive might almost be called academic,
a mere manifesto of a sect. A moral could be and was drawn by the friends of
civil-service reform in the former case, in which the Vice-President himself
was involved with the Senators from New York in an intrigue against the assassin’s
victim. A moral of some sort might have lain open to panegyrists and to a gravely
reflecting public had the homicidal fanatic at Buffalo been a Filipino, a Cuban,
a Steel-Trust striker, or a gloater over the daily cartoons of the yellow journals
implicating the President with the Money Power. For this no room was left by
the anarchist who simply proved that the most powerful ruler on earth, though
styled a republican and chosen by universal suffrage, was no more exempt than
any crowned head from the peril of sudden, malevolent extinction. The ruler,
not the individual, was shot at, and vigilance alone, not reason, can avail
against minds which learn nothing by seeing the succession of rulers keep even
pace with the file of assassins.
While all will freely admit that President McKinley’s
hard experience has no lesson for him, unless it be not to expose himself so
freely in public hereafter, some foolish journals and politicians teach that
ordinary criticism of the Executive has tended to breed the maggot in Czolgosz’s
brain, and is, therefore, measurably responsible for the result. This is of
a piece with the contention that anti-Imperialists in this country were guilty
of the American lives lost in the Philippine campaigns. The extreme application
of such nonsense would reduce us to a condition worse than that of the land
of leze-majesty. All the safeguards of free speech would be gone in an instant,
and we should witness the reductio ad absurdum of a form of free government
which gave us chief magistrates dictated by the machine, straightway to become
exempt from all adverse comment or the semblance of “disrespect.” Mr. McKinley’s
philosophy not more than his temperament is our warrant for believing that he
would laugh at such a pretension on the part of his flatterers. Any realizing
sense, too, of the prayers offered up for his recovery by partisans and non-partisans
who stand aghast at Mr. Roosevelt’s replacing him, would make him see the value
of independent judgment of those who occupy, as well as of those who may possibly
occupy, the Presidential chair.
The President’s good luck has once more, humanly
speaking, been exhibited. He has disappointed his would-be murderer; he has
every prospect of finishing out his term; his constancy may even be put to the
test by a more or less genuine demand from his party that he revoke his resolution
not to serve for a third term. In all this there is again a contrast to Garfield,
who had given reason to doubt that his Administration would have increased his
fame, and who was, by the best-informed, counted fortunate in being cut short.
On the other hand, Garfield’s character and talents were unquestionably exaggerated
by the circumstance of his death, and some monuments were reared which would
otherwise probably never have been thought of. Praise in excess of what he has
received, Mr. McKinley is not likely to have, and there is still time for him
to furnish grounds for a solid reputation which will outlast monuments.